


All These Plans I've Been Chasing (getting caught up and wasted)

by Eloisee



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Late Night Conversations, M/M, Overuse of italics, Ryan is drunk as a skunk, Shane has a lot of feelings, theres an ed sheeran song playing in the background
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-13
Updated: 2018-11-13
Packaged: 2019-08-23 04:16:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16611776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eloisee/pseuds/Eloisee
Summary: “Please tell me you aren’t calling me to bail you out of some sketchy San Francisco jail cell right now – because I will hang up on you.”“First of all, the implication that my mama raised me as anything but an upstanding citizen is hurtful,” Ryan says, “and second of all, I’m lying on a road.”“A road?” Shane repeats in alarm.“It’s a good road, very comfortable. High thread count, Egyptian cotton and all that.”





	All These Plans I've Been Chasing (getting caught up and wasted)

Ryan calls just as the lead singer starts crooning to the chorus of a particularly maudlin Ed Sheeran ballad.

The vibration of his phone causes Shane blink back to reality, the murmurs of the crowd around him coming keenly into focus. He hastily dips his hand into his jacket pocket and squints at the brightened screen. 

_RYAN IS CALLING. ACCEPT/DECLINE_

Shane frowned. Ryan hardly ever called - he always preferred to text. Which meant whatever he was calling Shane about at 11pm on a Saturday night was probably more important than the fifty bucks Shane just bombed on the entrance fee to this rather depressing music festival. 

“I’ve got to take this!” He half-whispers half-shouts to his brother over the music, who merely waves him away, never once looking away from the stage. Cradling the phone in his palm, Shane ducks out through the crowd, ignoring the slew of dirty looks thrown his way as he mutters incoherent ‘excuse me’s and ‘sorry can I just slip by’s as he wades his way out of the crowd surrounding the stage.  

His mind filters through what possibly could have prompted the phone call. Normally, he would have chalked it up to Ryan calling to patter on about finding a particluarly articulate garble on their audio recordings from their latest shoot. But Ryan had flown up to San Francisco on Friday night to play at the ISA charity basketball game, which meant he probably wasn’t calling Shane to gloat about a particularly mouthy gust of wind.

 A thought suddenly wheedled into Shane’s mind, nearly causing him to plow directly into the chest of an irate LA hipster in panic. 

Was Ryan injured? Did he break an arm trying out whatever fancy MBA trick shot he picked up from watching those Laker re-runs? Did he need Shane to donate his spare kidney because some beefy player elbowed him a bit too hard in the ribs? 

His phone was still vibrating in his palm when he finally makes it through the crowd. Leaning against the side of a food truck parked at the edge of the venue, Shane finally accepts the call.  

“Ryan?” He says breathlessly. 

“Shannnneeeeeeeeeeeeee!” A familiar raucous laughter filled his ears. Shane felt his heart unclench and the tension he didn’t even know he was holding in his shoulders relax. Ryan was fine, Ryan was happy, Ryan was -  

“Are you drunk?”

There was a pause on Ryan’s end as Shane hears the unmistakable thumping baseline of club music filter through the receiver.  

“Nooooooo?” Ryan’s voice was relaxed and happy, “I may have taken some shots - that’s all.” There was some scuffling sounds on his end, as the club music behind him suddenly faded away. He had probably either left the club or ducked into the bathroom. 

“You wanna quantify that number for me buddy?”

“Five - maybe seven?” Ryan babbles. “I lost count man. The Asians here party _hard_ \- and I was in a frat.” 

 _Definitely plastered then._ Shane grinned. “Ok spill man - what’s with the late night phone call?”

“Can’t a dude call his best dude on a Saturday night without having some ulterior motive?” Ryan slurs, a dull thud of something hitting the ground resonating in the background. 

Shane scoffs. “Please tell me you aren’t calling me to bail you out of some sketchy San Francisco jail cell right now – because I _will_ hang up on you.”

“First of all, the implication that my mama raised me as anything but an upstanding citizen is hurtful,” Ryan says, “and second of all, I’m lying on a road.”

“A _road_?” Shane repeats in alarm.

“It’s a good road, very comfortable. High thread count, Egyptian cotton and all that.” 

“I don’t know about you, but I’d much prefer you to be in a jail cell right now rather than lying on a road waiting to be steamrolled by a Honda Civic.”

“I’m lying on the pavement.” Ryan corrects. “And Steven is taking blackmail pictures of me from inside the club because he’s a horrible friend and _I hate him!_ ”. In the background, Shane hears Steven’s hysterical laughter fill the receiver.

Shane shakes his head, tipping his head against the side of the taco truck to look up at the muggy LA sky above him. He imagines Ryan lying on a dirty pavement somewhere outside a bar in San Francisco, phone plastered to his ear and face tilted to the night sky. He wonders if Ryan was looking at the same stars as he was.  

“Why did you call me, Ryan?” Shane prompts again.  

“Oh yeah! I forgot about that - ” Ryan hums happily. “We won the game - 73 to 72 can you believe that? It was like a fucking _Air Bud_ moment man.”  

“And who was the universally beloved basketball-hooping canine of this illustrious match?”  

“Technically Jason cos he made the point - but I assisted! You should have been there man - I felt like I was being possessed by the spirit of Le Bron or something.” 

“Was Ryan Bergara possessed by the spirit of Kobe? The case will remain - ” Shane pitches his candence theatrically, pausing for dramatic effect. 

“- _Unsolved_.” Ryan actually honest to god _giggles_. “I’m four-eighths Japanese so technically I’m like 50% ninja you know.” 

“I’m sure your ancestors are very proud of you.” 

Ryan laughs. “But are you proud? Of me?”

Shane senses the uncertain pause at the other end of the line and somehow the conversation wasn’t just about basketball anymore. 

_Are you proud of us? Of Unsolved?_

There was a certain vulnerability in the drunken honesty of the question. Unmarred by Ryan’s usual confident and boisterous personality. Over the years, Shane has become more in tune with Ryan’s moments of self-consciousness, just as he has become adept at recognizing Ryan’s fear. 

Ryan’s fear was easy to spot, because he never really tries to hide it. It is always laid bare for all to see when they go shooting in increasingly decrepit locations. Shane has learnt to recognise the way Ryan’s voice pitches in terror when the wind blows a little bit too hard against the window. He recognises the twitchiness of Ryan’s nervous indecision - torn between wanting to push further into the unknown and to hide away from the darkness. Most of all, he recognises the way Ryan hangs back on this precipice of indecision, waiting for Shane to push them both over the metaphorical cliff. 

But Ryan’s self-consciousness was a more subtle pantomime.  His nervous laugh before landing a joke. A laugh too sharp and too abrupt to be genuine at a comment he does not know how to respond to. And the way he _looks_ at Shane, with that same blinding belief that he would carry on whatever bit Ryan had somehow launched both of them into.

Shane feels his heart ache for some inexplicable reason.  

“Of course I’m proud, Ry.” He finally says, and he finds that he means it. _Of Unsolved, Of everything. Of you._

Ryan laughs again. He was a happy drunk, as Shane has learnt from that one Test Friends shoot and the countless office parties after that.

“I wish you were here.” Ryan says with such a casual air that Shane nearly missed it, because apparently alcohol is one way to absolutely obliterate Ryan’s instinctive no homo filter.

“I don’t know about you, but I don’t exactly have a desire to drape myself over a San Francisco pavement.” Shane says wryly, pointedly ignoring the way his heart practically soared.

“We don’t have to lie on the pavement.” Ryan amends, “We can get a bed. A nice big bed where your legs don’t hang over the ends and I don’t feel like ghosts are going to come disembowel me in my sleep - " 

And because Shane is only human (contrary to what a fair percentage of the YouTube comments on their Unsolved videos claim otherwise), his brain is abruptly assaulted by distressing, but also sexually confusing mental images of Ryan curled up against him in a king size bed, his bed hair sticking up in little tufts, his eyes closed in sleepy contentment and - _oh god why does his subconscious secretly want him to spoon his best friend?_

Shane squeeze his eyes shut and tries very, very hard to not to make any distressed noises that would alert Ryan to his personal sexual crisis. 

“ - and you talk sometimes in your sleep too.”

Shane is jolted out of his tiny existential crisis to realise that Ryan had finished talking, and he really has to say something and pretend he hadn’t just missed 70% of the conversation because he was too busy fantasizing about Ryan’s gravity-defying bed hair.   

“Uh - I don’t talk in my sleep?” Shane hedges. It comes out more of a question than a statement. He cringes and hopes Ryan was too drunk to notice. 

“Oh, you totally talk in your sleep dude.” Ryan says, with the blinding amount of drunken confidence reserved for people who are seven shots of tequila in. “I watch you sleep sometimes - when we sleep over on location.” 

“You - what?” 

Ryan huffs. “When I can’t sleep, I just look at you so I don’t have to look at the darkness, just in case a _face_ appears you know - and you talk sometimes. Half the time it doesn’t make sense like, there was one time you kept repeating Poe Dameron’s name in this weird breathy way and I’m pretty sure you were having a sex dream - but I didn’t say anything about it because I’m a good friend, and also because but it was kinda cute.” He pauses and there was a beat of mutual realisation. “Oh god, sober Ryan is going to be so pissed that I just said that _.”_  

Shane blinks and tries to process the revelation of this startling new information that one, apparently he was a mouthy sleep-talker and two, Ryan had been engaging in some vaguely troubling Edward Cullen-esque tendencies.

“Um, and what would sober Ryan think?” He tries.

“Sober Ryan cannot be trusted.” Ryan informs him matter of factly. “Sober Ryan took seven shots of tequila and clearly cannot make good life choices.” 

Shane lets out an amused snort and the topic was dropped. Shane was sure that some day down the line, one of them will bring up this conversation and they will have to talk about it. That was something future Ryan and Shane had to deal with, but for now, all that mattered was that he was lying on some godforsaken public ground, thousands of miles away from Ryan and yet feeling like they had never left each other’s side. 

It was kind of a weird metaphor of their entire friendship. Ryan brings them to increasingly horrible, abandoned places, and Shane somehow finds himself swept up in the Ryan’s vortex of screaming spirit boxes, and dressing up like a puritan villager from the 1600s. They have always been orbiting each other in a way. From the time they were seated next to each other on Shane’s first day as an intern, because R comes after S on the HR manager’s alphabeticised name list. Till when they were drafted to make up the male demographic of the Test Friends. And now, where they are next to each other in this crazy roller coaster of a life where they are heading this internet empire based on their self-pandering banter and whether ghosts are real. 

“How do you do it?” someone once asked him. “How do you do a show on something that you don’t believe in?”

And that was the thing isn’t it? Shane didn’t believe in the supernatural, in ghosts or demons or whatever the fuck are _orbs_.

But he sure as hell believed in Ryan Bergara.

Shane tips his head back at the sky. Overhead, fireworks bloomed against the inky blackness of the sky, marking the end of the festival.

“Hey, Ryan?”

“Yeah, big guy?”

“Don’t tell him I said this but – I kind of like Sober Ryan too.”

Ryan’s laugh was brighter than any firework in the sky that night.

**Author's Note:**

> Ryan's basketball team in the ISA Charity Game was the Crazy Ripped Asians because of course it was.
> 
> Title is from Oh Wonder's Plans.


End file.
